On the future of academic conferences
My first academic conference was in the year 2000. It was in Seattle, at the old Burke Museum, on the University of Washington campus. I was a naive but plucky undergraduate, curious about how to making programming easier, and presenting a paper on a how to use an HCI method to evaluate programming language tools. The presentations were fine, and my talk was fine, but what was truly valuable was a brief 30 minute lunch that I serendipitously arranged with the professor who would become my Ph.D. advisor, just after the tutorial he gave before the conference. I got to ask an endless series of questions, talk about my interests and my work, and get a sense for how he thought. That short lunch was probably a big part of why I was accepted into his Ph.D. program, accessed a huge range of academic opportunities, and have the career that I have.
This pandemic, not to mention mounting public concerns about climate change, is starting to test the viability of these high-value, face-to-face, serendipitous academic interactions. On the one hand, we all tacitly appreciate just how important meals, outings, and impromptu hallway conversations can be to building community, welcoming newcomers, and connecting around ideas. On the other hand: we can’t travel right now, academics might not feel safe to travel for years, and place-based academic meetings have always had significant negative impact on carbon output and starkly excluded all members of a community who do not have travel funding to attend. Academic conferences are, whether we want to admit it or not, a luxurious, valuable, beloved privilege of academia that is only available to some and cause great harm to our planet.
As many conferences have been forced online because of COVID-19, many of us who’ve enjoyed this privilege have been forced to consider what virtual conferences might be. This first wave of virtual conferences in March and April have largely been heroic emergency pivots led by volunteer organizers. Consequently, while they meet some needs and have satisfied many, they aren’t really expressions of the best of what virtual conferences could be. And despite that, many of the attendees have enjoyed them—especially those who would never been able to attend otherwise.
This begs an important question: should all academic conferences be online going forward? Or most? The arguments are pretty compelling. The experiences with emergency pivots seem to be positive enough. They clearly reduce financial, familial, and disability barriers to participation. Given the speed with which conferences have translated their experiences online, it clearly reduces much of the logistics overhead of reserving, paying for, and organizing space. They clearly reduce carbon output.
All of these wins come at only a few potential costs: a reduction in the frequency and fidelity of serendipitous connection that we all intuit is so important to academic progress, and the enticing perk of regular academic travel. Perhaps now is the time to make make the switch, and find new creative ways of achieving serendipity online, and scratching our travel itch in different ways.
As the junior chair of a small but growing ACM conference, ICER 2020, and the senior chair for ICER 2021, this is far from a hypothetical, distant choice for me. My team and I have to find ways of promoting serendipity online; our conference isn’t until August 2020, and so our community expects that we have plenty of time to do more than just a bunch of Zoom presentations. And looking toward 2021, my organizers and I have to decide whether to book hotels for 2021 now, scouting locations and signing contracts. If we don’t, and we do meet in person, we risk having no place to meet, and being forced online anyway. So while I’d love for us to see how our ICER 2020 virtual conference experience goes before we decide whether 2021 is virtual, the choice is upon us.
This urgency has sharply defined a key question in my mind: how important is place to serendipity? Is it possible to promote serendipity encounters, exchange, and relationship building online? There are so many things to try. For example, work on the “fast-friendship procedure”, a form of structured relationship building with promising effects in-person and online, has found that scaffolding new connections can not only help form trusting relationships in online learning contexts, but through those relationships, support learning. There are also things that can happen online that can’t happen as easily in person: for example, many people are now familiar with seeing into the homes and family life of their professional colleagues. Can structured encounters build upon this vulnerability, while also better engaging newcomers and attendees who never would have been able to travel? Can we better include people who are blind, low-vision, and deaf because online media are more amenable multiple forms of content, such as closed captioning, textual and visual forms of content? Can we improve how we welcome newcomers, especially those with social anxiety, by creating more structured encounters to longstanding members of a community?
Of course, all of these opportunities to emulate or even best in-person conferences come with their own inequities. Inadequate hardware, poor bandwidth, lack of privacy at home, work, or school, and the inherent unreliability of the internet and software, all threaten to be a persistent challenge. Face to face conversation doesn’t crash; non-verbal social cues will always smooth over rough discourse. And the diversity of social experiences possible in life, even ones invented in situ, will always best the rigid structures of software on dimensions of play and presence.
Speaking only for myself (and not for the ICER conference), when I balance these pros and cons, it is hard to make the case to continue meeting in person, at least for small conferences. I think would try to strike a balance between the two. For example, in my own communities, of HCI and Computing Education, we have large flagship conferences like CHI and SIGCSE, and then many smaller conferences. Perhaps we keep the in-person large annual conferences, which preserve a bit of travel, high-fidelity communication, and surprise. But for all smaller conferences, perhaps we should mindfully explore the design space of online experiences, saving people travel, saving the climate carbon, while expanding participation to parts of the world that cannot fly 5,000 miles to a specific place. Smaller conferences will play a new role then, being home to geographic inclusion, maintaining relationships that are deepened at in-person annual conferences, and exploring new structures for interaction that may some day be superior in some ways to face-to-face academic exchange—and can be called upon in future times of social distancing.
Of course, what I’m describing here is not to different from what most of academia, where there are a myriad of journals, and perhaps only one major conference to attend. Computer science, late to this party (as is it is to most parties), might be able to leapfrog toward a more innovative future, charting a course for more inclusive academic meetings. As the ICER 2021 chair, I’m certainly eager to further envision this future, as I help decide whether to pursue it.
What do you think about most conferences being virtual? What do you think of ACM’s virtual conference guidelines? Would you strike a different balance? Write me at ajko@uw.edu or @ me on Twitter with your thoughts.
